Last week there was a lot of surface activity, small dimples, and I didn't hook anything. Had a couple of whacks at a dry fly by things too small to get a #16 Adams in their mouths. But mixed in were some decidedly larger swirls.

A couple of nights ago I got there at sunset and saw some boils but couldn't get rigged up in time to still be able to see a fly on the darkening water.

Some of you are aware that I'm a man of quirky prejudices. When it comes to trout, they should be (a) native, (b) wild, (c) taken on dry flies, and (d) on moving water. Soon enough I'll get to dredging woolly buggers through ponds, but I needed to get at least some of my criteria met before moving on.

This morning I thought dawn was too cold and windy to justify getting out of bed, so I didn't hit the Indian Head until about 8. A duck hunter asked me what fish were in there, because at dawn there were fish rising everywhere. [Insert harshest expletive that Juro allows on this board here]. I did spook some fish, saw some rises, heard some splashes, and finally hooked and landed a 7" trout on a too large elk hair caddis, satisfying (c) and (d) above.

No moving water is on the state's fall stocking list, and the smallness had me hoping that this was a wild somethingorother. I was puzzled by the trout itself, because its color was more blue than anything else. Its spots were black (ruling out brookies, the true native, because all char have spots lighter than their backgrounds), and it had several red spots along its lateral line, but it had none of the brown or gold or yellow I've seen on brown trout.

So I asked Bill Bois at North River Bait and Tackle and he said that the state had indeed put a bunch of small factory fish in there recently and he guessed that hatchery trout might just have some funky coloration.

I know this is a big word count for 7" of fish, but heck, it's November and that's 7" more than I had so far. [All this changes with tomorrow's success, of course].